Born in São Pedro do Sul in 1945, António Homem Cardoso came, at the age of ten, to live in Lisbon.

Self-taught, his career is divided between photography and writing. His first photographs were published in the 1960s, one of a car accident in Santa Apolónia, in Lisbon, and another of the fado singer Beatriz da Conceição for the cover of a guide to the capital.

He currently teaches several photography courses and has published 70 books on photography, some of which abroad. The 40 years of Homem Cardoso's career were marked in Lisbon by the exhibition of part of his collection at the National Society of Fine Arts, in May 2007.